Live Longer Better
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    • Ageing is a normal biological process
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    • Stamina can be improved by brisk walking
    • Suppleness can always be improved and stiffness always reduced
    • Activity Therapy is of vital importance

​ 
What is stamina?

Stamina is one of the four s’s of physical fitness along with strength, skill and suppleness.  The word stamina is in every day use and one way to think about stamina is to think how long someone could keep going, for example could they walk ten yards, a hundred yards, a mile or two miles?  However stamina is best assessed when someone is under a bit of pressure and has to keep going.  
 
Imagine you are speaking to a room full of men aged sixty.  You could not assess their stamina accurately by looking at them sitting there, although you might have some idea, but if you got them all to run a mile and then come back to the room you would know much more clearly about their levels of stamina.  Some would probably not make it back to the room but of those who came back some would be much more distressed and recover much more slowly than others.  A general definition of fitness is that it defines your ability to cope with a challenge.  The greater someone’s stamina the less they are disturbed by being asked to do something which makes them breathless and the more quickly they recover 
 



​Why is stamina important?
 
Stamina is obviously important to marathon runners and mountaineers, but stamina is also very important for people of all ages. A general principle of preventing frailty and staying independent and enjoying a good quality of life ten or twenty years ahead is to increase all aspects of your fitness including your stamina. This will increase your reserves just like increasing savings in a piggy bank or deposit account.  The more stamina you have aged fifty the better it will be for you when you are sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety and of course stamina can be improved at any age, principally by brisk walking. Keeping active physically is obviously vitally important for keeping active socially and mentally and it is now known that isolation is one of the causes of dementia so keeping your stamina up helps you feel better, get more out of life, live better longer and reduce your risk of dementia and frailty.
 
What can you do?
Research and training is increasingly emphasising the need to move from  long slow training to shorter more intense training.  Jogging miserably around the block time after time is not a pretty sight and does not do you much good.  You need to get a little bit breathless not so breathless though you cannot speak. Some people try to achieve this in what is called High Intensity training but the aim is to get just a little bit more breathless so that you know you are a little breathless, but you can still carry on a conversation.  This is called Moderate Intensity training.  Using the One You app www.nhs.uk/oneyou the thing to do is to aim for at least one spell of ten minutes brisk walking a day and of course if you can do this two or three times a day  so much the better.
  • If you can’t do ten minutes then go for five, 
  • If you can’t do five then go for two minutes
  • If you can’t do two minutes then try standing up from your chair as many times as you can in one minute
If, on the other hand, you can walk briskly for thirty minutes you could try the Couch to 5K programme, which thousands of people have found helpful in helping them regain the stamina, and the confidence, to run 5K, alone, or better, as part of that great health service called Park Run
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